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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

In reality all generative art (both AI generated and old fashioned procedurally generated art) involves a human tweaking the knobs a lot and then selecting the best ones out of a sea of duds. To me it is clear that there is plenty of space for human creativity.

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In many ways its no different than electronic musicians building songs based on short samples of older songs. I have no doubt there will be rulings supporting the sort of creativity you're discussing at some point in the not so distant future.

But the key is that not all creativity can be copyrighted. Both US law and the Berne Convention (which almost all countries are party to) permit copyright only for artifacts fixed in a tangible medium, and it must be a human that does the fixing.

Tweaking knobs or writing prompts before the actual fixing is done doesn't count. Selection can't be copyrighted, just as ideas and mathematical formulas can't be.

Yes, but, it will be very dangerous for somebody using AI generated art to pursue a claim because they may find that the other party generated the same image first. :)

That raises an interesting situation as I expect that one would be able to copyright the 'prompt' but not the generated image, and since the generated image does not include a representation of the prompt then someone else could generate the same image without violating the copyright since they are not reproducing/publishing the prompt. Prompts are then best protected as a trade secret.

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